“Best? Yes, that tea was the best. Why don’t we go and have some more? Why did we leave in such a hurry?” Gouri was beaming up at Latika through her round glasses, her voice bubbling with enthusiasm.
When I landed after my first flight ever, my new mother was waiting inside the airport. I had a label on a string around my neck with my name and other details because I was travelling as an unaccompanied child. I was a parcel being sent from one country to another.
She came towards me with an eager smile. She had straw-yellow hair and grey eyes. She wore a frock. Nobody that old ever wore frocks where I came from. Her frock came to her knees, below which her legs were wax-white, with green veins running down the length of the calves. She had a necklace made of pink seashells in her hand. When she reached me she garlanded me with it and gave me a bright smile. She squeezed my hand, took my duffel bag from me, said, “How light this is! Is this all you’ve brought?” Later, in the taxi, she said she got me the necklace because she had found out that it was the custom in my country to welcome people with garlands – only she had not made it a flower garland because she wanted me to have something I could keep for always, something that would remind me of today, that would mark my passage across many seas.
I don’t know why I took my rage out on that necklace the day I overheard her telling her sister on the phone that it was too much, maybe it had been a mistake. She meant me, I was the mistake, although I had been with her three years already. The necklace was hard to break because the string was nylon, but I was angry enough, I did tear it apart, and have loathed shell necklaces ever since. I hadn’t asked to come to her either, to this lonely country where it was night all day and I had no friends. I flung the shells from my window into her garden where she would be sure to step on them. Later I saw her treading gingerly, picking shells from the grass.
Before the necklace I had had few presents. The gold earrings that had belonged to Chuni and oddments from Jugnu. He was the only person at the ashram who gave me things: flowers, fruits, oddly-coloured dry leaves, dead butterflies, flattened frogs, striped stones: these were his notion of presents for a girl. One day, he put together sheets of thin metal into a weathervane and said it would belong to both of us. He clambered to the top of his shed and fixed it there. He said when the wind pointed it northward, it would be time. Time for what, I asked him. Time to leave for a new country, he said. The weathervane screeched and squeaked on its spindle if it moved at all, but I was thrilled each time it shifted in the breeze and Jugnu said, “Look, it’s going north. It’ll be there soon. And then . . .” I would chorus, “And then we will leave.” Sometimes at night I lay awake thinking of the weathervane, wondering which direction the wind was blowing it. What if it chose to turn northward when we were asleep? What if it had turned north already and we had missed seeing it? Each time I passed Jugnu’s shed during the day I stared hard at the roof, willing that weathervane to turn. I made up all sorts of charms for it: if I saw seven green parakeets together, it was a sign that soon the weathervane would turn north. If a yellow butterfly sat on a blue flower, it would turn north.
Jugnu made a big to-do when he brought me something. You’ll never believe what it is, he might say, nobody’s ever had a thing so beautiful: as if he had brought me a pretty doll in a lace frock and not a twig wrapped in a dirty scrap of cloth. His mock ceremony made me giggle. I was wary of the other people at the ashram but never of Jugnu. He talked to me as if we were the same age. He made me feel grown-up and clever. He told me stories. He said that before he became a gardener he used to draw pictures for storybooks. His fingers looked too thick for pencils, though, so I would tell him he was making up a story about himself.
Jugnu would say, “What do you know about me? You don’t know who I am or what I was before the war did this to me.”
As the months passed, he changed. Some days, he would be in a bad temper and mutter to himself as he worked. Some days he would not talk to me at all except to scold me. He stopped going to the ashram’s puja hall and he hardly ever went to serve Guruji. He would sing kirtans, but his singing was almost a whisper, as if he were talking to God and he did not want anyone else to overhear.
One of Jugnu’s jobs was to pick the fruits and flowers to offer at the puja hall every day. He would pick them and I would follow him around with a basket. One day, after picking the fruit, he sat in a tree’s shade and patted a spot beside him. “Come here, I’ll tell you a story. From the Ramayana. It’s about picking fruit for God.”
I sat at the tree next to his feet. They were big, dirty feet with nails that looked as if they were made from the horns of cows, but I was used to them. I loved everything about him now. His face did not look ugly to me any longer, his scar did not look grotesque. I loved his hoarse voice, but I also loved the way we could work side by side together and he let me be.
Once there was a woman, he said, called Shabari. She was a hunter’s daughter, yet she hated the thought of killing animals and she ran away from home on her wedding day when she realised animals would be sacrificed at her marriage ceremony. She lived in a deep forest after that, in a hermit’s cave, serving the hermit. When the hermit grew very old and very ill and he was on his deathbed, he said in a sad voice to Shabari that he had spent all his life serving Lord Rama, and was leaving life without a glimpse of Him. That would not be her fate, he said, she would never be alone. She would always have Lord Rama by her side and one day He would appear before her, so she must be ready. After this, the hermit left his body.
Shabari understood his last words to mean that she would have to be prepared. She would have to feed Lord Rama and honour Him when He appeared before her. She would have to wait for Him in the very same place, otherwise how would He find her? Shabari was a simple-minded woman who thought of God as someone very like herself, as a friend of hers.
So she went on living in the forest, in her guru’s cave, even though she was now all alone and sometimes she lost hope. Every day she cleared the forest path to her hut and every day she collected berries from all over the forest so that she would have something to offer the Lord if He came to her home. She tasted each of the berries after picking them, to see if they were sweet enough for Him.
In this way the years passed. She waited and waited. She became a crazed, half-starved, white-haired old woman in rags and the Lord did not come. Still, every day she hobbled out and swept the path and collected berries for him. And as always she tasted each berry for its sweetness, then arranged them on a clay plate and placed a pitcher of cool spring water beside them.
At last one day Lord Rama did arrive. He was with his brother Lakshmana and they were in the forest searching for Lord Rama’s wife, Sita, who had been kidnapped. They came to Shabari’s cottage. They told her who they were. The old woman wept. The Lord had come at last! She had her plate of berries ready, as every day. Lovingly she offered them to Lord Rama.
Just as the Lord was going to eat one of the berries, his brother said, “Stop! These are half-bitten, all of them.” Lakshmana’s eyes were fiery. He opened his mouth to scorch Shabari with a reprimand.
Rama, serene, put the once-bitten berry into his mouth. He picked up another and said, “These are the sweetest berries I have ever eaten. And they are sweet because they have been collected for me with such deep love. She has tasted each one because she could not bear to feed me a sour or poisonous berry. How can I do otherwise but bless her with heaven?”
“At last her wait ended,” Jugnu said, “and why was that? Tell me? What is the moral of this story?”
He always asked me the moral of his stories. I usually came up with one, but that day I had to look away from Jugnu. I had no answer to give him.
Jugnu said, “The moral is that true, simple devotion is worth a hundred such . . .” He waved his hands around, pointing at our ashram. “A hundred such displays.”
I went back to my own work feeling as sad as the first day, when I had cried out for my brother and he had not come
. The story had done something to me. I thought I would cry, my throat felt stuffed with an emptiness I could not swallow. I thought of how Shabari had waited. In stories, waiting was never for nothing. But I knew by now that our weathervane would never point north. I would never be free. I would wait all my life and never again see my brother or my mother. Jugnu’s story had made me older. It was then that I realised I was old enough to know fairy tales were not true.
*
The first time I saw a display of the kind that disgusted Jugnu was when we were taken to the grand audience hall beyond the barbed wire. It was in a winter month. I know this because we strung marigolds into garlands for three days before the event and the scent of those flowers still brings back that day. We had been at the ashram for four years or more but had never been allowed to cross to the other side until now.
Across the fence were cottages with red roofs among groves of fruit trees. Tall, shiny lamp posts with curly designs on them stood between the cottages. One of the squares between the cottages had a tiled pond filled with pink lotus. Each cottage was surrounded by a fence and inside the fence there were patches of garden. A fawn-coloured cat with fur that shone looked at us from the verandah of the first cottage. Its eyes were as cold as glass. Another cottage had birds in a cage.
We walked through the gardens, led by Padma Devi. We had not left the ashram since we were brought there. A few among us, I think Jui, Champa, and Minoti, who were older than me when they came, had clear memories of the world outside, but mine were muddled and faded. These cottages and the high-roofed auditorium that stood at the end of the path looked like a different world to me.
That morning, we had been told, the chief minister of the state was coming to the ashram. He was Guruji’s disciple. Guruji had other rich and powerful disciples who respected his powers and this was why even illegal boat girls were safe inside the ashram. That morning, he was to preach a special sermon. Everyone who lived in the ashram would be there. Hundreds of his disciples visiting from all over the world would be there too. He had devotees everywhere, and ashrams everywhere. The outer room of his cottage on our side of the fence had photographs of beautiful ashram buildings in Vienna and Geneva and other places we knew about only from books. The ashrams abroad were in wooden buildings with sloping roofs and had pine trees and snow peaks behind them. Guruji even had his own aeroplane. There was a picture of him climbing into it to go to one of the foreign ashrams.
Everywhere Guruji went that morning, he was surrounded by followers who picked pinches of dust from the ground he had stepped on, and sprinkled it on their heads. We could see columns of people walking towards the hall. Although there were many people, there was no shouting or pushing, only the buzz of low voices and the shuffle of bare feet. We were taken in through a back entrance. We had been told we were to stay together, and to listen, not talk.
Guruji sat on a high stage on a velvet-covered throne with golden armrests. Behind him, all over the back wall of the stage, were oil paintings of the kind I had seen in his room, but much bigger, of birds in trees, among leaves and fruits. I saw a huge one with many parakeets, each of which looked like the bird I had seen in a cage during my first punishment.
A satin cushion kept Guruji’s feet off the floor. Some favoured devotees sat at the edges of the stage. They came one by one, stretched themselves full length and touched their foreheads to the floor in front of his feet. Dazzling lights shone on Guruji, changing from gold to orange. His skin gleamed under the lights. The people in the hall craned their necks for a glimpse and chanted his name. Only I knew he had a stump between his legs oozing slime.
Guruji began his discourse and everyone went quiet. He spoke from the books of all religions and as he did in our own assembly every day, he said that all religions were paths to the same God. He spoke of how the Buddha left home in search of truth. He spoke of Sufi saints and Jain monks. He recited a sacred Hindu poem and then quoted from the Bible to show how the love for God sounded similar everywhere. He spoke of how true mystics, such as he was, had been thought of as madmen by ordinary people. Nobody understood where the mystic’s strangeness came from. Would people not behave strangely if unseen by all, a star dropped into their hearts from the sky and lived on there, pulsing, burning? The things mystics did, or demanded of the people around them, these often seemed to make no sense, but this was only because ordinary people could not see the workings of God.
At times he referred to no books at all but spoke of daily things – problems between children and parents, husbands and wives, the price of vegetables – and at the end of each story he had a moral or a teaching that some of the people there wrote down in notebooks.
Every now and then Guruji paused in his sermon and went into a trance while his audience sang hymns. He would come out of the trance after a few hymns and look directly into the eyes of someone in the audience and say: “They say there are windows from one heart to another. How can there be windows where there are no walls?” Or, “How can we claim to know God when we cannot know our closest friends? Every other being is a mystery to us and God is the greatest enigma of all.” He spoke to the person he had pinned with his eyes as if he were seeing right into them. Then he closed his eyes and was transported back into his trance.
At the end some people were in tears while others sat as if they had been turned to stone. I noticed a tall white-haired monk standing by the stage, looking at the twelve of us one by one. It was long ago, but I was sure he was the man who had spotted us when Piku and I had crept to the barbed wire fence that separated our part of the ashram from the other and Bhola had caught us.
When Guruji had left the stage after his discourse, the twelve of us were brought onto it. We had been told to smile and stand in a row holding the next girl’s hand. We could not see the people in the audience because there were bright spotlights on us. Piku stumbled as we went up onto the stage. After that she clutched my hand throughout with her own clammy one. Her head only came to my shoulders. I had grown taller, but she was still a tadpole.
Padma Devi told the audience that we were a few of the destitute children that Guruji had adopted as his own. She said we were fed, clothed, and went to school at the ashram alongside paying students. Padma Devi’s yellow hair and blue eyes looked brighter under the lights against her pink sari. Her lips twisted to one side when she spoke so her flat, shiny face went out of shape. She thanked the audience for their generous support and gifts of old clothes and books. The audience clapped and cheered, but I saw that all of us were looking at our toes. I wanted to run out and throw away my clothes and books and pens and pencils. I plucked at my frock with my nails. I hated the pink flowers on it and the green polka dots between the flowers. I hated my round-toed shoes and the ribbons in my hair. When I grew up I would run away from here and have so many new clothes that ten cupboards would not be enough to hold them.
The Fourth Day
By the next morning Vidya was well enough for toast and tea. But when she and Latika went to fetch Gouri for breakfast, she could not be found in her room: they knocked and waited, knocked and waited, then got the receptionist to open the room with a duplicate key. Gouri’s handbag lay on the coffee table. When they went through it they saw her purse was missing, as were her prayer beads in their cloth bag. Nothing else that they could see was missing.
“Those address cards!” Latika said. “She’s left them in her bag.”
She must not appear over-anxious. She had not told Vidya about finding Gouri utterly muddled, packed and ready to go to the station the day after they had arrived in Jarmuli. Now she was too scared to confess it. What if Gouri had actually left the hotel this time, thinking she had to catch a train? She said, “She must be in the hotel somewhere. She didn’t like her room, maybe she’s still nagging them to change it.”
Vidya replied, “I do all I can, what more could I have done? Look, two cards missing. What do you think that means?”
She sank down onto the bed. Perhap
s she hadn’t quite recovered after all and her head was swimming because of her stomach trouble yesterday.
“Oh, what will we say to her son!” Latika said. “He didn’t want her travelling in the first place. He said so over and over, ‘She can’t be trusted alone any more, she forgets everything!’” What if Gouri became one of the missing whose grim, grainy faces one saw in black-outlined police advertisements in newspapers? And this wasn’t even the worst of the possible calamities.
“We ought to phone her son . . .” Latika could see his bald, pompous face in her mind’s eye. His thin moustache and his jowls. The way he said, “I’ll try and make time, but I can’t promise,” whenever you asked if he could drop Gouri over on his way to work. The way he pursed his lips when called upon to smile.
“If that fellow had his way, Gouri would never leave the house at all. Remember what he said to me at the station?” Vidya put on a baritone. “So, Vidya Aunty, what mischief will you girls get up to on your wicked weekend, hmm?” She seemed to gather energy and resolve at the memory of his voice. “We’ll find her, wait and see.” She had dealt with many kinds of problems during her time in the bureaucracy, including an absconding typist.
They walked through their hotel describing Gouri to anyone they saw. They went into a satin-cushioned room they had never seen before which was called the Mumtaz Bar; they crossed the dining hall, the lobby, the corridors, the row of chairs around the bathtub-sized swimming pool, the strip of land in front with its evenly-spaced columns of coconut trees – Gouri was nowhere. Vidya interrogated the chowkidar at the gate, who in turn asked the ragged bunch of rickshaw-wallas parked there if any of them had ferried an old, stout, white-haired woman that morning. They even tried going through a set of latched doors to the kitchen, but they were stopped by an agitated waiter.
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